Headline Analyzer

You’ve arrived, but feel lost. Or confused. You’re being bombarded with stimuli. Or too many choices. You’re unsure what to do next.

I know exactly what you’re going to do next. You’re going to leave. You’re off in search of a place where you feel comfortable, confident, more “at home.”

Now here’s the rub. You actually were at someone’s home—their home on the web—their home page, but something went terribly wrong.

The problem’s simple enough. The home page isn’t simple enough. The host made you work. As a website visitor, you don’t want that. And as a website host, your goal must be to invoke a sense of belonging.

The goal of a home page is to get the visitor to click

Bounce rate, which is revealed in your analytics, indicates the percentage of web site visits where only a single page was viewed. Translation: zero clicks.

For a blog site, you need not get overly concerned about bounce rate. One-and-done visits are common. However, those that enter your site via its home page are likely to be first-timers. In this case, a high bounce rate is deadly.

So how do you inspire a visitor to click a page deeper into your site? You interest them. And how do you interest your visitor? You communicate an idea that is easy to understand and memorable. Marketers often describe such ideas as “sticky.”

I’ll paraphrase from the book where they ask and answer the question, “How do you find the essential core of your ideas?” They submit you must be a master of exclusion. You must relentlessly prioritize.

The book’s chapter on simplicity also offers the following:

It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy environment

You must weed out ideas, even if they’re important, in an effort to highlight the most important one

Uncertainty—caused by multiple choices—tends to paralyze readers

Powerful ideas are compact and meaningful

Is your homepage simple? Does it elicit the response you want from visitors? If it’s not clear and compact, it’s time to review and revise it. It’s time to simplify.

What’s in it for me?

If you’ve studied copywriting even a wee bit, you’re likely to have read the “WIIFM” lesson. A common derivative of it goes: readers don’t care about your company or product; they care about themselves.

I want to say you get the idea. I want to say everybody does. But they don’t. In fact, I don’t think it’d be outrageous to say a painfully large majority can’t (and maybe never will) comprehend the concept. And it’s a pity because when you shine the spotlight on yourself, you lose business.

Your headline has a job to do

While your typical web-browsing human is obviously not a goldfish, researchers like to explain his or her average attention span falls short of the little orange pucker’s.

This means your job is to create a page, which is capable of expanding the average attention span. You need to grab ‘em fast. This is the headline’s job. The headline on your home page is the first line the visitor reads and therefore the most important line on your entire website.

It focuses on your leadership or some other form of self-congratulation

Understanding it requires additional reading

It delivers more than one message

It puts clever before clear

It’s trite

It isn’t about the visitor

It doesn’t deliver a WIIFM

My take on the simplest and truest test of your home page headline: its job is to get some readers to think, “I’ve come to the right place.”

Note the italicized word “some.” It makes an important point:

Your goal isn’t to appeal to everybody. You can’t.

In a KISSmetrics post, Joanna Wiebe, an accomplished copywriter and conversion specialist, explains, “Great copywriters know that you don’t write for 100% of your traffic. If you try to make everyone happy, you’ll make no one happy. Seriously. Writing for 100% gets you conversion rates of 2% (which is why most Fortune 500s have such abysmal conversion rates).”

Let’s evaluate home page headlines

For the show and tell that follows, I’ve selected a single niche: marketing automation platforms. I like this for a number of reasons:

You’re a marketer, so you may recognize some of the companies

They’re marketing companies, so they should do well

Their products are complex, so they have a simplification challenge

Here we go.

Marketo’s “Marketing First” message may be concise, but it’s not clear. The copy that follows, “master the art and science of digital marketing,” begins to get into value proposition, but ultimately is about Marketo, not me.

Ouch, a slider, meaning multiple messages are presented—slowly. The objective of this frame is clear. They want you to download a paper. The paper is going to explain why you need to be a modern marketer. Why not tell me the answer? Provided the answer explains the benefit of becoming one, I’d click.

The headline reads, “Marketing Maturity Has An Impact on Business.” Hmm. I’m expected to know what marketing maturity is. I don’t. If I synthesize it a bit, I think, “I must be an immature marketer.” While that feels slightly urgent, it puts me off.

Here, we’re provided an ideal example of how to not write a home page headline. Act-On chooses to focus on Act-On. Their headline reads like a bad press release and scores a nice round zero for emotional connection.

Every other element is equally disastrous. The main image is beyond comprehension. The call to action is a generic “learn more” (and competes with three more CTAs just below it).

Don’t do what they do.

Thanks HubSpot. They’ve provided an example of what I mean by “WIIFM.” This headline is miles from amazing, but at least, if I have a business and want to grow it, I may click something.

I should explain, this home page “hero shot” is animated. The word “business” gives way to a sequence where it’s replaced by “traffic,” then “leads,” then “customers,” then “revenues.”

It’s a bit of a yawner, but it’s about me. Oddly, it doesn’t qualify me in any way. The sweet spot for HubSpot is small business, but I believe they aspire to enlist any size business. The ambiguity shows.

I want to endorse this one (or any one). Thumbs up for “drive sales.” I get that. Thumbs down otherwise. “Accelerate pipeline?” WTF?

The subhead reads “Power your B2B marketing and sales success with Pardot marketing automation.” I already know the name of the company (since I’m at their website), but there are some information bits in there that might help.

A headline that could work might be, “Drive your B2B sales with marketing automation.”

I suppose you’ve gathered by now even companies in the marketing space don’t excel at writing home page headlines. This, the first of a series of four dull slides, tells me “We’re Silverpop.” Did they think I missed the logo? The headline is a waste of space.

I hadn’t heard of Loopfuse, but read they’re an up-and-comer in the space. Then I learned Salesfusion acquired the company.

I give this home page headline a B. If my answer to their question is “yes,” I’m up for reading more or clicking. If they were to tell me why I should bring marketing and sales together in a concise headline I might give them an A.

Yes!

Disclosure: I write for LeadSquared. I’ve written several headlines for their home page, but this ain’t one of them, so this ain’t about me.

LeadSquared has tested this headline and concluded it works. Do I need to tell you why? We have ourselves a sticky idea. I know WIIFM. “Land more leads, close more deals.” This sounds appealing.

I’ll keep reading. It says I can “try it free.” This is perfect proof of how not to overthink it. This, finally, is an example of a home page that captures my interest. This is effective. No wonder the guy in the photo’s celebrating.

Stick the headline

If you’ve watched any gymnastics, you’re familiar with the idea of “sticking the landing.” The “stick” means the gymnast landed their final aerial trick by landing firmly on their feet. There’s no stumbling. No extraneous movement.

Apply the idea to your home page. Eliminate what’s extraneous. Don’t allow your reader to stumble. Write a solid headline that hits one point hard and clearly. If you sell a marketing automation platform and want visitors to click a page deeper, tell the reader what’s in it for him or her.

Generate more leads with your online marketing.

Do you have a solution that helps people stash stuff they saw online so they don’t forget about it?

Remember everything. That’s what I’m talking about. Do you help customers organize their finances?

Perfecto.

Do you make it easy for shoppers to find the car they want?

It’s easy. Let’s go. Nothing confusing there, right?

So please, make it a priority to improve your home page bounce rate by carefully scrutinizing the most important line on your website, the home page headline. Ask yourself:

Is your headline written from the visitor’s point of view?

Does it answer the question, “what’s in it for me?”

Does it invoke a sense of belonging for a specific persona?

What can you extract to get at the core of your message?

Now go consider if you need to replace your home page headline and stick it.

Write Better Headlines With A Free Blog Post Headline Analyzer

The headline analyzer will help you:

Use headline types that get the most traction for social shares, traffic, and search engine ranking.

Make sure you have the right word balance to write readable headlines that command attention.

See the best word and character length for search engines like Google and email subject lines, while also seeing how your readers will scan your headlines.

Great advice. However, one of the things I am finding is that much of the advice on how to do effective social media marketing on any topic, whether it be headlines or other things, the examples are on sales oriented sites, especially on other people’s social media marketing advice sites (Marketo). It becomes a vortex of social media marketers helping each other promote what they do, build their lists, page views, Likes, etc and to what end? To tell more social media marketers how to do it?

I would like to know more about how to get people to visit a post that has nothing to do with selling a product or service. Specifically, a news article. The format of

Get this – For your – Business

doesn’t exactly fit into something like “EPA Removes Two Toxic Hotspots from Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.” How would you treat a headline such as that in order to increase page views and reads?

You speak the truth in that in online marketing circles we do tend to refer to our peers.

I think you’ve written a strong, newsworthy headline there. Of course, you could consider writing several and doing some testing. At this site and mine, you’ll find several posts about headline writing, so keep reading, learning and experimenting. And remember, most everything’s measurable.

Finally, it seems to me the most pressing question you ask is about increasing page views. News leak: CoSchedule and Feldman Creative are in the process of creating a very in-depth resource about content distribution in an effort to answer that question the best we possibly can. Stay tuned.

Barry – Great advice. I find it puzzling that so many Websites fail to achieve even the basic when it comes to messaging, value propositions and benefits. It may be their product-centric view of the world, which means delivering oodles of information about their products and features, but little about how the value for users.

Smashing post from @barryjfeldman:disqus on a key challenge. Have just scheduled a tweet to my Twiiter community along with link to this post, in the hope I’ll get some visitor feedback on my own homepage http://bit.ly/concentricdots-homepage. Also plan to send link to this post via an email to be surer to get the required feedback from my circles. However, if anyone is willing to glimpse my HP and give me a heads-up here that would be great too :) http://bit.ly/concentricdots-homepage. Generally speaking the quality of the posts on coschedule are right up there alongside the very best, so hats off the content marketing team – true pros!

Great article. When I first read about bounce rate I didn’t agree it should be low and my website topic is an exception. My one site http://www.brightverge.com had 32% bounce rate and I decided to improve the quality of the page and bounce rate was up to 40% so you would think that is worse result but actually average time increased from 5 min 49s to 7 min 27s so in my case I believe this was a good result and I just need to work on the bottom part of my article so users can navigate to related article. I also have a site http://www.gocime.com with bounce rate 83% and avg time 5 min which is a solves a very technical issue and to be honest I don’t think any visitor would like to go to another page as they have an urgent issue they must resolve quickly so I don’t think I will be improving bounce rate in this case.

But overall I do want to reduce bounce rate but only by improving quality of my pages to my users.,

Nico

Great article. Think the headline is the number one thing to focus on. I tried a couple of different things to reduce my bounce rate and just targeted my most popular posts. Found a few interesting things that worked. For example including a CTA in the P.S. was very effective. Other things I did included adding a story to the start of the post and increasing the length of the copy.